@ocsigen/ts2ocaml

ts2ocaml

Generate OCaml bindings from TypeScript definitions via the TypeScript compiler API.

Installation

npm install -g @ocsigen/ts2ocaml

Or if you are using yarn:

yarn global add @ocsigen/ts2ocaml

An in-browser version may be available in future.

Overview

Goals:

• Provide a way to quickly generate a missing binding to some JS package you need in your project.
  • This tool can generate OCaml bindings to JS packages from TS definition files (.d.ts), which you can use with minimal modification.
• Help library authors by reducing the amount of boilerplate code they have to write by hand.
  • This tool can be configured to generate an imperfect but simpler version of bindings, which you can easily modify to create a better binding library.

Non-goals:

• Generate a binding written in 100% OCaml-idiomatic way.
  • OCaml has very different programming concepts from TypeScript, so it's not very straightforward to translate TypeScript's concepts to OCaml's one.
  • This tool will simply generate bindings which closely resembles the original TypeScript definitions. It's human's job to translate it to OCaml-idiomatic API.
• Perfectly replicate TypeScript's type system in OCaml.
  • Many of the advanced types in TypeScript, such as keyof T or T extends U ? A : B, are simply impossible to simulate in OCaml.
  • In those cases, this tool will leave them as untyped. It's also human's job to (possibly) restore type safety with some other means.

Documentation

For users:

• Common options among all the targets
• ts2ocaml for js_of_ocaml
• ts2ocaml for ReScript (ongoing)

For developers and contributors:

• Overview for developers
• Note on modeling TS subtyping in OCaml

About this tool

This tool is heavily inspired by fable-compiler/ts2fable, which generates Fable (F# AltJS) bindings from TS definition files.

This tools is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Changelog

[1.4.6] - 2023-07-13

• Fix a bug which generated unnecessarily duplicated option type (#315).